March 31, 2015

I can almost see this title as a eggshell-white comic strip in a Sunday Featureette with everything else in color-- it just sounds so, well, wrong, and colorless. Fact is though that at this time Einstein was working on weapons projects for the U.S. Navy, and evidently he needed to account for his work time just like everyone else.

The "part time" was what interested in this. What was he doing not being part time?

It was actually a little more than that, the "part time" part. Because until he was hired by the Navy on 2 May 1943, Einstein worked "no time" on the war effort. Not full time, not part time: no time. The FBI thought him not trustworthy, and he was rejected by Army G2 in July 1940 as not clearable.. Einstein was out--in spite of the fact that he wanted desperately to work on something to help defeat the Nazis, and he would have made a pretty good go-to guy. In May '43 though he was cleared by the Office of Naval Intelligence and he went to work--at $25/day-- on sub warfare and HE projects, much to his high happiness.

Einstein did so without the Navy haircut, as he liked to tell.

I have this post in my Blank, Empty and Missing Things series for the missing/absence/emptiness of trust and judgment extended to Einstein in wartime.

In addition to this there are three other images, all hiosted by the U.S. National Archives, here: http://research.archives.gov/description/597840

March 23, 2015

Sometimes there's nothing better in finding the absurdity in quiet mundane than actually finding it, rather than creating it. This is the case with the following images, all of which have a certain flat, blatant, absurd quality to them--for their conversation (or lack of it), poses, stares, direction of vision, and so on. All of them come from "Maintaining Good Relationships" a chapter in the provocatively-named Tested Selling Methods (1939). None of the following conversations say very much, and on the face of them (presented without their captions) most are about nothing, or seem to be.

Women of course are approached differently from the men, almost like children, though mostly salesmen were warned to place women in the position of making decisions for the household.

March 13, 2015

The RAND Corporation (Research And Development) is a think tank originally formed in 1946 by the US Army Air Force as part of a contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company.After 1948 RAND Corp was funded by a number of different sources, private and governmental, and left the sphere of being a direct arm of the U.S. military. (Maybe.)It still did enormous amounts of work on behalf of the military, and seems to have been their chieftheoreticians during this period.It was also the time that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was formulated at , partially under the direction of we’ll-see-him-again-down-the-road Robert McNamara.And of course much else.

This publication (Project Rand, Next Generation Weapon After the IBM. RAND Corp., 1957). was an internal RAND document, not yet meant for the eyes of the outside world, at least in 1957.I own a number of these reports, and I must say that this one is odd—it seems quick and flippant, sometimes oddly and darkly unintentionally funny.It is also short (four pages) and gets to the very meaty part of the issue immediately.The author(s) assume that the US and the USSR will have achieved a point of stasis such that it would make absolutely no sense for either actor to actually employ their arsenal (and excluding “the possibility of the button pusher ‘flipping his lid’ “.The paper attempts then (“let’s jump right in and assume we find ourselves in this stalemated period”) to envision the next kind of war in which the ICBM would not be an active factor. “We therefore postulate here that the kind of war we will be engaged in…in the period of nuclear stalemate of the non-violent war, the opening phase of which has been called the cold war.”

March 07, 2015

Well: this is "inside" the book in which nuclear fission is announced--the backstrip/spine was pulled away on one edge from my um "lovely" copy of Naturwissenschaften, volume 27, 1939, to reveal the chocolatey-nugget equivalent of the guts of a book. This is the famous volume which contains (at least) six seminal contributions in the history of nuclear physics including the big one by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman (on January 6) in which they announce the discovery of uranium fission1. The spine cover is still hinged on one side, making it a convenient flap to see the covering for the glue etc. holding the sewn signatures and the spine together.

The anatomy of the book reveals a pretty and interesting art-ish composition, with a surprise: there are major elements of Albert Ein(stein's) name display, clear as an azure sky of deepest summer (a line by Peter O'Toole from The Ruling Class).

This is highly appropriate. Einstein naturally knew of all o these developments and felt deeply threatened by them because of the next step, which would be atomic-bomb-building. So on August 2, 1939, he and Leo Szilard wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt urging American development towards this end, because surely the Germans would be up to it as well. Although written in August the letter (the first of three) would not be delivered by Szilard to the President until October. I think that it can be safely said that this meeting was the first step in the development of the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt's immediate reaction in this meeting was to insist that the U.S. do The Mega Big Something to ensure that "the Nazis don't blow us up".

In any event, I found it at first artistic and then weirdly interesting that Einstein's name almost appears in the hidden part of this important volume.

Notes

1. This would be cleared up further as nuclear fission by Lise Meitner in the February 11 1939 issue of the journal Nature.

January 22, 2015

This hand-out pamphlet seems to be a case where the sale of an edible product is made for the sale of its packaging.

The pamphlet shouts that CANDY IS DELICIOUS FOOD, which is certainly a correct statement if food=digestible. It tells/sells the story of candy as a profit-maker to the grocery seller, saying that "32% average gross profit on home consumption units", those delicious-sounding unit-things being the candy.

There are bits and pieces about candy display and placement, all on the advice of the maker of the stuff that in which the candy was wrapped--cellophane. The publisher and distributor of the pamphlet, the "Cellophane" Division of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. Inc., had a huge vested interest in candy sales: candy was mostly wrapped in Cellophane (starting with Whitman in 1912) and by the time du Pont achieved its water- and moisture-proof Cellophane in Delaware the product accounted (in 1938) for 25% of the company's profits. That's pretty big, and so candy as a major muncher of Cellophane would be promoted by du Pont as pretty big, too. And as food, for added Bigness.

January 18, 2015

These spectacular images of monumental monumentality appeared in the December 1916 issue of Popular Science Monthly. The author Frank Shuman (1862-1918) had some major inventing chops, not the least of which was some very forward-thinking work (in theory and practice) on solar power (one of which was a solar powered steam engine and another a liquid O2 propulsion system for submarines), so these suggestions for gigantic land battleships came with a fair amount of gravitas. This is some grand thinking, and as Shuman tells us, the beast below would weigh about 5,000 tons (the weight of several hundred Sherman tanks1) and would roll along on 200' diameter wheels. Unfortunately, outside of seeing some sort of (steam) power plant, there is no mention of how those wheels would be turned--I'd've liked to read about that. There is a mention of shock absorbers, but only so, jsut a bare hint.

[Image source is Google Books--I have this volume in a 40 year run of this periodical down in the warehouse, but the book was really too thick to lay flat ont he scanner, and so the Google Books scan was used..]

And for whatever reason there is no heavy artillery on this thing. The damage to the enemy would be done via the three wheels, and also by the enormous chains that hang from the front of the enormity, like a flailing slow-moving monster from a 1950's B-movie.

I found this interesting story-without-words in a column in American Agriculturalist, April, 1869. The velocipdes were fairly big, and fairly new-ish to be peddle-powered at the front wheel, and apparently not so welcome on urban streets. (Within fifteen years the bike would take on a decidedly very modern look, easily recognizable as being a close family member to that Schwinn cruiser you owned in 1982.) I don't have any insight about the editorial content of the segment...

January 01, 2015

Contributions to Way Out of Today's Depression is a pamphlet written in a econo-engineering fashion by an engineer with some strong opinions on regulatory economics, many of which seem as far outside the normative and at the other end of the spectrum of the investing practices that necessitated such thinking. (For example, in addition to a discussion of very closely regulated federal interventions there is a statement that would make "high finace" a crime like treason, with similar punishment.) There was much flotsam amidst the jetsam and vice versa and perhaps nothing to salvage in the sinking mess, but this graph at least looked interesting:

And the very out-of-the-ordinary cover, which has a very definite Outsider quality to it:

December 18, 2014

I've catalogued a number of pamphlets on this blog that are on the Outsider/Found-Surreal/Uninentional-Absurdist spectrum, people who reveal their insights into the un-insightable, or their outsights into the great Outside world that is unseeable because it is unseen, or unknowable, or non-existent. Sometimes it is all-existent, though the insights bearing upon the issue are the unknowable, non-retrievable, self-referential, private-logic and private-language communications. Sometimes there is insight in that, but usually not.

This day's installment has the feel and look of something from the 19th century, but is it comes from 1912, and the rants and razor-vision is localized on Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. I'm not sure what the author's point was, because it is all fairly circular, a circle of words filled with a another circle of words, and who knows really where they go.

November 26, 2014

This is the very striking cover design for a pamphlet written by Dr. Julius Klein (the assistant secretary of commerce) produced by the Institute of Makers of Explosives (103 Park Avenue, NYC, who of course made a large play for blowing stuff up as a positive driving force in the history of civilization. And they are right in many cases, obviously, but the images and title taken out of context are very provocative.

Dr. Klein starts off by disabusing the reader of the “bad press” of explosives: “a good many of us, I imagine, labor under a misapprehension about the explosives industry…we conceive of explosives as an instrumentality of havoc. But that conception is utterly wrong.” Utterly? The man does have a point of course, which he explains in subject headings like “Dynamite the Liberator”, “Many Unusual Uses”and “Explosives Release Raw Materials” But “utterly”? Its a real piece of heavily worked propaganda that makes the case for the economics goodnesses and misunderstood destructive values of TNT.

November 19, 2014

This is an addition to the infrequently-seen What is It? series of this blog...

Okay, so I've given it away in the title--if not for that, this wouldn't be a very obvious contraption, would it?

There must have been a lot of people who had a problem with street cars in the 19th and early 20th centuries because in my meanderings through the Scientific American I have seen quite a few suggestions for dealing with the pedestrian vs the heavy moving metal problem. Many of them have to do with the humanified locomotive cow-catcher--that is an apparatus that would somewhat safely scoop up the unfortunate pedestrian before they became very fatally unfortunate. Here's just one example, found in the February 3, 1894 issue:

Neither the scoopee nor the scooper look pleased.

This problem is better illustrated by an early film of street traffic--it is amazing in a way that the orchestration of non-fatalities is so seemingly superb, the coercive element of the destruction of liminal space pretty well hidden in the seeming confusion.

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

There's nothing that shouts "WRONG" with greater voice than images like this. Like pornography and art, things that are just plain wrong are instantly recognizable, and this is a fine example of that thinking. Anti-Gas Protective Helmet for Babies, Manual of Instructions was prepared for the Office of the Director of Civil Air Raid Precautions of Ottawa, Canada, and published in 1943. I'm not sure that the image of the nurse in the gas mask isn't as disturbing, but the two of them together is just too much.

I wasn't aware of the gas attack preparations in Canada--the situation was entirely different in Britain, where everyone was required to own a gas mask, and by 1940 more than 38 million had been distributed to the population. But the planning was underway in Ottawa in '43 for the worst, as removed and distant from the war as just about any other place on earth--but the Air Raid Precautions people pulled no punches in their hearts and minds campaign, and I'm sure that it was very effective. This little pamphlet certainly caught my attention.

And it wasn't as though the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany weren't doing anything about poison/nerve gas during WWII--they were. There was very little use of CW during the war, though the Japanese military did use it relatively widely against Chinese troop,s guerrillas and civilian populations during several years in the war between Japan and China leading up to the outbreak of WWII. There were large stockpiles of CW in the U.S, Great Britain, and Germany, though the weapons were allocated for last-ditch doomsday operations should the opposing side start using them first.

November 15, 2014

Building on some reaching and questionable physical identification work of Sir Francis Galton, Raphael Pumpelly tried to make photographs of what scientists looked like.

At a scientific meeting of the National Academy of Science in Washington D.C. Pumpelly (along with Dr. (Thomas Mayo) Brewer and the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, (Spencer F.) Baird) undertook the experiment to determine whether or not there was a certain composite "type" in groups of academicians. He employed the justly-named head of the photography department at the Smithsonian, Mr. (Thomas Mayo) Smillie, to make a series of 2-second exposures of the scientists upon a single glass plate. Two seconds per portrait was not long enough to make a defined portrait for a single sitter, but if there 15 or 30 such exposures on the same plate it was seen that collectively there would be a strong impression. The resulting portraits are interesting in their won way, but probably not without the backstory.

I came to this pamphlet from a design/composition point of view, finding in it a peculiar attractiveness in its gritty-typeface and loud speculation. That said, the title is of little use to tell us of its contents, and so opening to page 37 (in deference to my wife Patti Digh who finds much significance in the number) I found on the opposite page the "it does not matter that the German people of the Reich have a different form of State from America", and that the form of state so far as the Germans were concerned was "a matter of fate".

Interesting, and, well, unfortunate, because the publication date of the work is 1936. The author, Mr. A.T. Fredex, implores the reader to consider that there is "no more a liberty-loving people than the Germans", and that they are a free and liberated people. The German state of today was subject of certain internal "troubles" and that successions of leaders--for the good of the people--were forced to keep the nation together with "more or less gentle pressure".

And so the skeleton of the fleshy produce of the pamphlet is revealed. "Already the sneers of the yellow and black races are haunting us", writes Mr. Fredex, who continues in just the next paragraph that all that remains to happen would be for Socialist France to "mobilize her millions of Negroes" along with the help of "Bolshevist-Mongolian Russia" against Germany, which would be the last refuge of normalcy in Europe, the thing protecting the Western world from who-knows-what.

All of this is in three paragraphs of one page. Then comes the race part, the Teutonic purity and excellence part, and the horrors of race-mixing and "mixed blood" that will wind up dooming America.

I skipped ahead, or behind, to the end, where we are warned by Mr. Fredex to awaken our Nordic interests should Germany fail to hold back the assaulting races.

This is really quite a story to unfold in just two of the pamphlet's 56 pages--the rest of which I think need no further exploration.

The pamphlet cover, though, retains its interest, forensically speaking, and can only hint at the pamphlet's evil and filthy contents.

November 13, 2014

This is a beautifully design object, and for a moment I thought that this might actually be a sympathetic-Communist pamphlet--something from the Paulist Press, for a Catholic high school system, and from 1936 when there were still plenty of Reds running around the U.S.--so I needed to look around the booklet a little bit.

And of course I found out what it was really about just about instantly, and so there was no mistake about what the Passionate Father was really passionate about:

This is pretty strong stuff considering that Communists weren't terribly uncommon in the U.S. half-way through the Depression, though that can be mostly due to the absence of the real story about what was going on in the Soviet Union under mega-murderer Joseph Stalin. But really it is more the Socialists who were more popular in the off-party politics in America in the mid-'30's. In any event the author hit the Communists pretty hard based on their anti-god and anti-Catholic positions, so, naturally, there was very room left at the table of philosophy for the Communists.